1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a pattern matching and a pattern matching method and, more particularly, to means for calculating the degree of matching of image data to data of a reference pattern by comparing the image data input to a camera with the data of the reference pattern.
2. Description of the Prior Art
A conventional pattern matching for detecting the position of an object to be detected such as an electrical component placed on a substrate and recognizing the shape of the electrical component has been performed by storing data of pixels of an image input to a camera in an image memory as black and white binary data or multi-valued data and matching the stored data to the data of the pixels of a reference pattern stored in advance in the memory one by one.
However, since the above-mentioned conventional means matches one by one the data of the pixels of the image with the data of the pixel of the reference pattern, there arises a problem that a great deal of processing time is required.